Podcasting At It’s Best with The Blog Herald

The microphone is a Kel HM-1, which is a cardioid condenser microphone. It’s mounted in a Kel shockmount to reduce noise from vibrations and other external influences. In front of the microphone is a standard pop filter that helps filter out my explosive P’s and Q’s so that they don’t flow into the podcast. All of this is mounted on an AGK deskmount broadcast arm which helps keep the mic where I want it.. and out of the way when we’re not recording.

The Kel HM-1 microphone is provided with phantom power from the first item in our rack – the Peavey PV-8 compact 8 channel mixer. This mixer allows the input for up to 8 channels of sound. The mixer allows me to independently control the volume of each inbound channel – as well as provide for insert processing on 4 of those channels.

From here, the microphone signal crosses through two different processors.

The first is a TC Electronic C300 Compressor/Limiter and Gate/Expander. Essentially, this is a processor that takes the inbound signal from the microphone and processes it according to settings that I establish. Currently, we have it first set to “gate”, or basically silence the microphone except when I am speaking. In other words, it waits for the sound to cross a certain threshold before passing it further down the mixer chain to be recorded. This allows us to eliminate a certain portion of the background noise from the computers and other noise sources in the room. After it “gates” off the ambient noise it listens for the “hum” from the computers when I am talking and works to eliminate that hum.

If you are into serious podcasting, this is worth checking out for the tips and equipment used.